You either believe what people say or you don't. There are plenty of comments on HN along the lines of "when I was at google..." or "our site does 500 req/sec". Not sure why weekend project claims would, somehow, be less trustworthy.
The reason I say it's a weekend project is to let people know that a relatively small amount of time was spent on it..so it might not have the polish of a more exhaustive system.